“Máquinas simbólicas”: narrativas expográficas sobre trabalho na perspectiva da cultura material no Ceará, em Alagoas e em Minas Gerais (1997-2023)

Abstract

This research proposes to analyze the mechanisms present in the materialization of narrative constructions about work and Labor Justice in Brazil. Through four central museological spaces, building comparative analysis with correlated museum spaces. These being the “Memorial da Justiça do Trabalho do Ceará”, “Memorial Pontes de Miranda” in Alagoas, the long-continuance exhibition entitled “Trabalho & Cidadania'' at the Labor Court Memory Center of Minas Gerais and the long-continuance exhibition circuit of the Museum of Arts and Crafts of Belo Horizonte. These narratives constitute mechanisms of ideological elaboration of what would be the Labor Court, its relationship with the universe of labor and, consequently, the category of “work”. Narrative fabrications culminate in attempts to consolidate who would be the subjects to integrate this universe through memory, this memory being mobilized from varied objects and artifacts, such as photographs, and other signs of visual and material culture. The research used a methodological approach of comparative analysis between the aforementioned museological spaces, with the aim of understanding how objects placed in exhibitions communicate erasures and visibilities, demarcate the gender, race and class of subjects, as well as the choices about what must be in the Technical Reserves communicate narrative intent, viewing an analysis from the perspective of intersectionality. The aim of this study is not to build an idea of the ideal type of museological space, it is to understand the internal mechanisms present in the attempts, and especially in the materializations, of the narrative constructions about work in Brazil, indirectly and directly. This understanding is essential to get rid of a dualistic view of the world, breaking with the tendency to divide it into opposite pairs: reality/imagination, fact/fiction, form/content, myth/science, subject/object.